


this sudden burst of sunlight (and me with my umbrella)

by shinealightonme



Series: just what a fool you have made me [2]
Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Alternate Universe- No Supernatural, Developing Relationship, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Past Adam/Blue - Freeform, Yoga, background Blue/Henry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-22
Updated: 2019-08-22
Packaged: 2020-09-23 00:03:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 21,659
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20330725
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shinealightonme/pseuds/shinealightonme
Summary: "How did you meet him?" is a question Adam should have expected upon telling his friends he has a new boyfriend. It should not be hard to answer.And yet.





	this sudden burst of sunlight (and me with my umbrella)

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was written for Idlewilds3 as thanks for a generous donation to fandomtrumpshate! Idlewilds wanted to see a continuation of the boxing/yoga verse, with Opal, Noah, and lots of domestic Pynch physical affection, I hope this delivers :D

"How did you meet him?" is a question Adam should have expected upon telling his friends he has a new boyfriend. It should not be hard to answer.

And yet.

"Um. He came to the spa."

"The spa at the club for rich douchebags?" Blue says, incredulous.

"He was only pretending to be a rich douchebag," Adam explains. "He's really just a rich asshole."

Henry _hms_ thoughtfully. "Yes, that tracks."

Blue stares at Adam until he looks away.

"Only you, Adam."

"I know."

"Only you. You are the only person I have ever felt guilty about breaking up with. I feel responsible for these disasters."

"Well, don't," Adam says. "This is my disaster, I'm screwing up all on my own."

"This is exactly how I want my new paramours to talk about me," Henry says. "It is so boring to be 'oh, this is Henry, he is wonderful, I'm so glad I met him'. From now on it is only to be 'he's the worst, I'm making a terrible mistake with the full knowledge that it is a mistake'."

At least Adam _does_ know that he's making a mistake. It's not going to stop him from making it, but maybe it'll make it easier to live through the inevitable break up; he can say _at least I was right_.

"Henry, I love you," Blue says, "but you are not a bad boy."

"Ah, but now I have an example to learn from. Adam's new beau shall be my guide. You must tell me _everything_ about him and how he ensnared you."

Adam sighs. This inquisition is his fault; if he'd told them about Ronan right away, they wouldn't have a month of pent-up meddling to get through. It's just so hard to talk about a new relationship, when there's no reason to think that it's going anywhere. And that's in a _normal_ relationship. Dating a former client from his least favorite job who stole someone else's identity and then got thrown out of his least favorite job for starting a physical altercation is as far from normal as Adam can imagine. It's a miracle that it's happening at all. Expecting it to last would be asking for a second miracle.

And yet with Ronan, impossible things just -- happen.

He got Ronan's address from his brother and showed up at his front door unannounced, and instead of running for his life Ronan invited him in.

He warned Ronan about his impossible schedule and instead of getting fed up Ronan visited him at work when Adam couldn't make time for him.

His boss at the mechanic's got annoyed that he had a guest and Ronan proved he had an uncanny ability to understand what Adam meant by 'hand me that thing,' so Boyd let him stay.

Adam lost his temper and Ronan lost his temper too, and the next day Ronan skipped right over the remorse and guilt and recriminations and let them go on with their lives without Adam feeling like a monster.

It's working out so well that Adam is driving himself crazy looking for the catch.

"I'm not ensnared," Adam says. "We're -- seeing what happens."

Blue squints at him in that way she does when she thinks she's got a read on him. Which she nearly always does, but Adam takes solace in the fact that she doesn't look as clever as she thinks. It's more like she's trying to see a gnat on the tip of her nose.

"You're overthinking this, aren't you." She doesn't even pretend that it's a question.

"I have seen your boyfriend," Henry declares. Adam never should have brought Ronan to guerrilla yoga. Despite Ronan's reality-distorting powers, Adam isn't ready for the _meeting each other's friends and family_ stage. Judging by this conversation, he never will be. "You should definitely bow your mind intelligence to your body intelligence where he is concerned."

"Great, I'll keep that in mind. Can we go back to talking about the straight guy you're trying to seduce?"

"He may think he is straight," Henry says. "I know better."

"It's rude to contradict someone else's orientation."

"On the contrary, it is a public service."

"_Getting laid_ isn't a public service." It comes out meaner than it should, but Henry says "of course it is," perfectly earnest, and Blue gives an exaggerated sigh that turns everything before it into a minor irritation.

"Henry's crush isn't straight, Adam's boyfriend is wonderful, can you both clear your stupid heads already?" and when they get back to their mats she transitions from crow pose to handstand and back to crow pose, to reassert her dominance over their pack.

-

Adam doesn't manage to clear his head, at yoga or during his shift at the spa. He's still chewing over the conversation that afternoon at the library, when the girl shows up.

One tiny hand appears on the counter in front of Adam, and then another, before her head of short blonde hair comes into view. She hoists herself up on top of the help desk, kicking her feet against the side and crawling on her elbows, graceless and undignified as only a kid can be.

Adam lets her get settled, sitting with her legs crisscrossed, before he greets her "hello" exactly the same as he would any of the university students. She nods at him, a great deal more solemn and dignified than most of the university students Adam's ever met.

"What are you reading today, geology?"

She thinks about this and then shakes her head.

"Roman history?" This time she nods.

Adam pulls out one of the books he keeps stashed at the help desk. None of them are children's books; it's a wide range of nonfiction, plus a hardback copy of Great Expectations with a ruinous mansion on the cover. Adam hates Great Expectations with a passion, but it isn't his job to censor other people's reading, even if the person in question is in elementary school.

He hands her the textbook and leaves a dictionary on the counter a foot away from her, as though by coincidence. She wrestles the textbook open -- it's comically large in her tiny hands -- and lays it out on the desk so she can lean over it and pour herself into a map of the Aegean Sea.

A grad student comes to the desk a few minutes later and immediately get distracted from her own question. "Oh! Is she yours?" she gushes, "she's _adorable_."

"She's very studious." Adam ignores the question. It's not the first time someone has assumed that the little girl sitting at the help desk when he's on shift is there with him, his sister or daughter. He isn't going to lie and say that she is, but admitting that she isn't would raise questions he doesn't know the answers to.

All he does know is that one day a few months ago a little girl had appeared at the help desk and stood on tiptoe to slide an enormous text on astronomy across the counter to him.

He hadn't known what to say, so he'd gone with "you need to have a student ID to check out a library book."

She'd scowled and tried to take the book back, but it was pushed out of her reach.

He'd nudged it an inch closer to her. "You don't need an ID to read it here in the library," and she'd taken it back and gone to sit in an armchair, the book open on her lap and her feet dangling inches off the floor.

She'd stayed there for a couple of hours, slowly flipping through the pages, and then she slammed the book shut and walked off for the exit, leaving the book on the chair.

Adam retrieved it and placed it in a drawer instead of reshelving it for anyone to claim.

A week later he spotted her wandering the stacks in the astronomy section and told her "your book is at the help desk," and then it became this _thing_, the tiny child who hangs around during his shifts reading one enormous book after another. The next time it was biology, and then zoology. She'd grab a book from the stacks, using who knows what kind of selection criteria, or collect one from him at the help desk and then sit on top of it, squinting at the small print on the thin pages. One time he saw her mouth moving like she was trying to silently sound out a word, and he casually grabbed a dictionary from the reference desk and put it on the counter. She glared at him, but he'd gone right back to work like he didn't care either way what she did with it, and when he looked over later the dictionary was open -- to a page with the word _disembowel_ at the very top, but maybe that was a coincidence.

Today is only a brief visit. The girl hangs out for about an hour, flipping indiscriminately through the history of Rome, republic to empire and back again, and then she catches Adam's eye and taps her wrist.

He looks at his watch. "Four-thirty."

She swings her legs over the edge of the desk and hops off. 

"Do you want me to leave your book out?" Adam asks. She's usually around for longer than an hour; maybe she's going to the bathroom.

She shakes her head at him and then runs for the library entrance.

-

Henry is still begging Adam to bring Ronan back to guerrilla yoga for a chance to examine him in detail, which means that Adam has to find alternative places to do his workouts. He had decided that every time Henry or Blue asked him about Ronan he'd wait another week to introduce them, but that date very quickly got pushed out to 2021, and statistically speaking they'll have broken up by then, so he stopped keeping track. He's trying to take a more relaxed approach and introduce Ronan to his friends when it feels right.

It doesn't feel right yet, so half the time the best he can manage for workouts is him and Ronan in the tiny gym in Ronan's apartment building. He has to spend more time and mental effort on Ronan than on his own practice, but that's becoming satisfying in its own way. He hadn't expected that. He never understood what Henry and Blue liked about teaching.

"Breathe," Adam reminds Ronan, who exhales in one fast loud huff. Adam smiles, amused in spite of himself. "Find length in your spine."

Ronan steps out of tree pose. Given that he was two second away from falling out of it, that isn't a terribly dramatic gesture.

"Not you, too," he says. "I thought you were smarter than that."

"I thought you were a contracts lawyer named Declan."

Ronan scowls. "This is worse," and oh, Adam is paying attention; there is nothing funnier than Ronan's rationalizations for why everyone else's sins are more serious than his. "I didn't think you were one of those yoga freaks that said shit like that, 'find length in your spine' and 'channels of energy' and 'ethereal qualities of the body'."

"If I ever say 'ethereal qualities of the body' you have my permission to kidnap me and hire a deprogrammer." A thrill of accomplishment runs through Adam when Ronan grins. "'Channels of energy' is different."

"Energy doesn't have _channels._ It's there and then it's not."

"There are entire disciplines of science that refute that claim."

Ronan waves him off, _psh, hundreds of years of scientific inquiry, whatever_. "Yoga takes normal shit and makes it sound stupid and weird for no reason. Lengthen your spine," he says, disdainful, in a way that shouldn't make Adam smile but does. "Just say _stand up straight_."

"But that's not what it means," Adam says. "It's about straightening your back, but it's also about your shoulders, and your hips, how is your weight distributed, where is your energy," he says faster, before Ronan can interrupt, "but that's too many things to keep track of all at the same time. If I tried to tell you to do all of that at once you'd think I was picking on you." Ronan shrugs, _yeah, actually_. "You just...do some of it, some of the time, and other parts other times, and you do it a hundred times thinking it's complete bullshit, and then one time you do it right and it makes sense."

Ronan listens to all of this, and then he says, "ah, crap."

Adam tenses, ready for Ronan to tell him he's pretentious or a loser or _a hippie_, which has lately become the lowest tier on Ronan's hierarchy of humanity, but then he adds:

"Someday I'm going to be brainwashed enough to think this shit makes sense, too. I'm going to blame you."

The worry dissipates. "Yeah, yeah, come on, lift up through your heart."

"Jesus Christ, I can't believe _this_ is the cult I'm joining," Ronan mutters, "you couldn't have been in a fight club?"

-

It's a slow shift at the library, which means Adam can get some of his own classwork done. He finishes the entire outline for the paper due next week, more progress than he thought he'd get to make, but the real joy is when he looks up from the help desk halfway through his shift and there's Ronan. He was starting to think he wouldn't see Ronan today.

"I overslept." Ronan rubs a hand across his face, like he's still in the process of waking up. Adam doesn't point out that it's nearly five o'clock. He wants to run his hand across Ronan's face too. He feels a burst of giddiness, stupid and reckless. "You take your break yet?"

He hasn't, so they go sit on the lawn outside the library. Adam eats the sandwich he packed for lunch. Ronan puts his head on Adam's lap. His face is clouded over, too dark to just be fatigue. The bright shine wears off Adam's mood.

"Something wrong?"

"I get bored all the time when you're not around," Ronan says. "And I can't even go to the club and punch rich guys anymore."

"You didn't spend that much time boxing. What else did you used to do when you got bored?"

Ronan doesn't answer right away. Adam takes the last bite of his sandwich. He figures he knows the answer to that already, _play with my car_ or _hangout with Noah_ or _fluctuate wildly in my performance of brotherhood_. He isn't asking so much to get an answer as to remind Ronan that there is an answer.

Ronan says, "I never realized how much time there was."

A flash of anger.

Adam tries not to think about the fact that Ronan was born rich. That Adam has three jobs and Ronan has _none_. He's pretty sure if he thinks about it for any length of time, that will be it, goodbye exciting new relationship with strange wonderful boyfriend.

The best thing to do is to let that go, and he knows it. He needs to just get over it. He needs to not care that Ronan's life of luxury is being shoved in his face like a hardship.

And Ronan is still going. "How did you end up doing all -- " he waves his hands in a very dismissive summary of Adam's entire life. " -- this?"

Adam bites out the word "necessity."

Ronan turns his face up toward Adam and the sky, his eyebrows drawing together. "You're mad at me," he says, slow realization, like he's putting together pieces into the only explanation that will fit them.

"No," Adam says, ice cold, "I'm just at my second job of the day. Sorry if I don't have the energy to sympathize with the fact that you're _bored_."

Ronan sits bolt upright. Adam draws his legs up, knees in front of him. He regrets it a second later. It looks defensive. It looks like he's five years old. It would look worse to back down.

The confusion has dropped off Ronan's face, stepping aside too easily for anger. Adam thinks he can't judge Ronan if he's the one who got mad first. Adam wonders if he has to judge Ronan, if they can both go from cuddling to pissed off in ten seconds flat.

"I didn't realize there was a merit-based system for giving a shit about each other," Ronan says, vicious. "What do I have to do before you're willing to _sympathize_ with me?"

"You could try doing _anything_."

Ronan stares, hard. His jaw clenches, like he wants to say something but won't.

There's a long empty second that ought to have a _sorry_ in it.

"Look," Adam says eventually, pathetically, "I'm not a good audience for this. You should talk to someone else."

Ronan looks down at his hand. He's running his thumb over the knuckles of one fist.

"But I want _you_ to get it."

Adam braces himself before he nods. He can listen for a minute. It can't be harder than anything else he has to do in a day.

"Time just...disappears sometimes," Ronan says, in clumsy halting syllables, like he's never put this into words before. "I think, what did I do today, and it was nothing. Not like, all I did was fuck around, or get wasted, or go to the _club_," and normally Adam laughs at Ronan's utter contempt for the club and everyone in it, but nothing about this is funny. "I did _nothing_. And I didn't even notice time going away because...maybe I'm nothing. Maybe everything is just bullshit that doesn't matter. But then I see _you,_ and everything you do matters so much. You matter so much."

Adam feels Ronan look up at him like it's a physical attack. He can't say anything. He can't move. He stopped breathing, at some point.

"Fuck," Ronan says, "fuck, I fucked up again."

Adam pushes himself as hard as he can and unfolds his knees, lays his legs out flat on the lawn and offers his lap back up to Ronan.

Ronan stays where he is, looking into Adam's eyes like he's searching for some confirmation, but this is it, this is what Adam can offer. It's so little, and if Ronan refuses the recoil is going to tear him open anyway.

Ronan lies back down on the grass and rests his head on Adam's thigh.

Adam breathes out, one long shaky exhale, and rests a hand on the back of Ronan's neck. Ronan shivers.

They lie like that for a long time before Adam can find anything to say.

"I've always had to do things." Adam has never explained this before. He isn't sure it can be explained. "Doing nothing was never an option. But -- there's had to and _had to_." He hates how that sounds, obvious and meaningless, but he can't find a better way to put it. "I had to work to stay alive, but -- I had to work at a mechanic's because I didn't like it when something was broken and I couldn't fix it. I had to do yoga because I tried it and I was _bad_ at it and I had to know that I had more control than that." He sighs, frustrated that he can't find any better words than this. "Isn't there anything you ever did because you _had_ to?"

Ronan kicks the question around before he answers it.

"Mostly stupid shit," he says eventually. "Or bad shit." He's silent, but obviously not done. "I used to sneak out at night. There was this tree right by the window, you just had to jump a little bit, you could get in and out if you weren't chickenshit. But there was a nest. I didn't even see it until I'd kicked it over, and then...there was this one little baby left, and her parents never came back. And I thought, Jesus, you'd have to be a real sick fuck to let a baby bird starve to death, so, I didn't." He shrugs, shoulders pushing into Adam, grounding him. "I was the only kid at my school to ever get written up for smuggling a bird into class."

"That doesn't sound stupid or bad," Adam says.

"She flew off when she was all grown up. She's probably dead by now."

"That doesn't mean it didn't matter."

Ronan stays flat on his back, silent. Adam rests his hand lightly on the pressure point behind his ear.

"Isn't your break over by now?" asks the man who can never be anywhere for himself on time. Adam returns to the library for the rest of his shift. Ronan tags along, drags a stack of ornithology books to the help desk and makes faces at Adam behind the patrons' backs.

-

The girl comes to the library sporadically. If there's a pattern, Adam doesn't have enough data points to figure it out. He doesn't know if she comes by when he's not working; he's afraid to call attention to her by asking, and he doesn't have an explanation he could give if someone asked why he wanted to know.

So it's a few weeks before she and Ronan end up at the library at the same time. Ronan's schedule for crashing Adam's work is also unpredictable, although there's some common elements: almost never in the mornings, the library more than the shop, and after he does it a few times he'll stop abruptly, like he's had enough, or like he thinks Adam might have. It's for the best, either way; Ronan and Boyd have come to a weird truce, but it's better not to push it, and while the library might be open to the public that doesn't feel like an excuse that would hold water with his supervisors if anyone ever complains about the foul-mouthed hooligan hanging around the help desk.

The girl is there first, reading Roman history again, when Ronan arrives and rests his elbows on the counter. He leans forward in that way that manages to lay claim to the entire desk, like he can keep anyone else from taking Adam's attention away just by existing loudly enough.

"Oh, Ronan, you get to meet my favorite patron." Adam is genuinely excited; he probably looks like a dork, the way he's smiling.

The girl glances at him, and then at Ronan, unimpressed.

Ronan scowls back at her, declaring war on a child. "I thought I was your favorite patron."

"You're not a student."

"What, and Matilda is?"

Apparently she takes this as an insult. She returns Ronan's glare, does a pretty good job replicating it. It still comes across as funny more than threatening, either because she's so small or because, after six weeks with Ronan, Adam no longer reacts as normal to getting glared at.

"Hm, that's a point," Adam muses, and raises a hand to his face, visibly weighing the matter. "No, she's still my favorite."

The girl laughs outright.

Ronan scowls at Adam -- which only causes more inappropriate hilarity -- before snapping at the girl, "if you're so great why are you reading Zimmerman, he's a moron. You'd be better off reading Albright."

She considers Ronan's question, tilting her head thoughtfully, and then she holds out one hand, palm up.

"No, I'm not going to give you Albright, he's garbage too, he's just less rancid garbage."

She gestures more emphatically -- _gimme_.

"Fine," Ronan snaps, "fine, Jesus, I'll just go find a book while the librarian and the world's shortest nerd sit on their asses," and he wanders off into the stacks before Adam has wrapped his head around what's happening. Does Ronan even know where he's going? He's followed along while Adam reshelved books, but it's a big library, even people who know what they're looking for and are in here all the time can end up asking for help, and Ronan -- is in here all the time, and apparently knows what he's looking for.

Adam does a quick search. He has to poke the girl's book to check the author's name, but that's easy to do; she's already abandoned it. He doesn't find anyone calling Zimmerman _rancid garbage_, but he turns up some articles that convey the same idea in twenty times as many words. He grins while he skims through them. Higher education is more of a necessary evil for Adam than a passion, but he still appreciates a good academic slap fight.

Ronan returns with two enormous books which he thumps down on the desk, and one slim volume on top of that, which makes a less impressive _pht_ when he throws it down.

"If you _have_ to read in translation, this one doesn't totally suck" is the entirety of his explanation.

The girl pushes the garbage book clean off the desk and grabs at one of the Ronan-approved ones. It's big enough her little hands have trouble, and new enough that the spine doesn't want to crack open, but she wrestles it into submission. Ronan doesn't offer any help, just gives a _right, that's that then_ nod once she's got it down.

Adam takes his break not long after, while the girl is staring enraptured at a sculpture of Romulus and Remus and the wolf. He manages to wait until they're out on the lawn to ask "how did you know all that?" although it's still obvious that he's dying of curiosity.

"I had to take a billion years of Latin," Ronan answers, which, _what_? Also, when Ronan says _a billion years_, Adam normally translates that to _a couple of months, at most_, but he wouldn't have gone into that kind of depth in a couple of months. Adam took three semesters of Spanish for his language requirement and he can't rate the credibility of any particular Spanish historian. Also, _Latin, what?_

"That's...cool," he says, which is desperately wrong. _Latin expert_ is as far from cool as one human being can get.

"What, do you want to hear me conjugate verbs?"

"If you're offering."

Ronan rolls his eyes. "You could have just said you had a nerd fetish."

"I don't."

"Uh-huh, sure," Ronan says, unconvinced, but he Adam doesn't, really; it's more that Ronan has taken on a new dimension. He can't find the words to explain that, though; _I like you more now because you surprised me_ isn't an improvement on _I have a nerd fetish_.

The girl is still there when they come back from Adam's break. Ronan reads over her shoulder until she shoves him with tiny hands and then _graciously_ offers him one of the books that he'd brought her. Ronan hovers nearby while he reads, arguing with Julius Caesar and appealing to the girl like she is an impartial judge, and she keeps peering over to look at what he's pointing to, and -- it's a lot, for Adam to deal with.

-

The spa is Adam's least favorite job, but it pays better than work-study and has more perks than the garage. He gets to bring home food from the restaurant sometimes, and if half the club members are the _didn't get rich by giving it away_ type, half are the _show off my wealth by leaving big tips for the grateful peasants_ type.

But that doesn't make him like it, because _ostentatious wealth_, but also because the schedule is so unpredictable. The spa takes reservations, but most of the club members don't bother, just wander over when they feel like a massage and expect someone to be free to serve them.

Adam is in the back room, running a load of towels for the gym and speed-reading the assignment for the next day's class, when the receptionist rings to ask if he can please take this client, he asked for Adam in particular and the other masseuses are in sessions already.

"Mr. Czerny?" he says, to get the attention of the only person waiting in reception. He's a young guy, which is a surprise. The club doesn't have a lot of members in Adam's generation; the young guys who come by are mostly just using their dads' accounts to run up huge bar tabs they won't have to pay. Adam doesn't often have to deal with them. "I'm Adam. Please, come with me."

Czerny reflects some of his own surprise back onto him, and as he follows Adam back into the spa he says, "you know what, I get it now, I see how that's weird."

"Pardon me?"

"Ronan always thought it was really weird that everyone here called him Mr. Lynch," Czerny continues. "I didn't see what the big deal is. Most people call him Lynch anyway, what difference does 'mister' make? Except yeah, that's weird. Mr. Czerny. I feel like I'm in trouble."

Adam lets this unfold, gives it a few seconds in case there's more. The comment didn't have a clear ending any more than it had a clear beginning.

It did make one point, at least.

"You're a friend of Ronan's."

"I'm Noah." He holds out a hand to Adam across the massage table. Adam shakes it because sure, what else is he going to do? "We were roommates at boarding school until he dropped out and ran away," and okay, Adam has heard Ronan mention Noah, but it's the first he's hearing about any of the rest of this.

"It's nice to meet you?"

Noah doesn't comment on the graceless way Adam turned that into a question. "You too! I've heard so much about you."

"Really?" That, Adam thinks he's allowed to doubt.

"By Ronan's standards, yeah. And I was at the club today, so I thought I would, you know."

Adam does not know. "Get a massage?"

"Huh?" Noah asks. "No, introduce myself. Why would I get a massage?"

"Generally when you ask to see a masseuse, the spa will assume it's because you want an appointment."

"Oooh." Noah takes in the room's low lighting and nature sounds like he's just realized where he is.

Adam takes pity on him. "You can leave, we won't bill you for it."

"Eh, it's already done." Noah reaches for his pants. For one horrified moment Adam pleads with the universe: if he has to give a massage to his boyfriend's ex-roommate, can he at least wait until Adam is out of the room to strip down?

Except Noah doesn't go for his belt. He reaches into a pocket to pull out a pack of cards. "Since we have time, want to play?"

Adam would rather go back to his reading, but he's relieved that this isn't turning into the most awkward appointment of all time, and relief makes him generous.

"Sure," he says, pulling over a stool. Noah sits on one end of the massage table and deals the cards on the other end. "What are we playing?"

-

Adam doesn't see Ronan until the next day, between his back-to-back Tuesday night classes and Ronan's lifetime ban from the club. ("Declan's, technically." "Yes, but it's _your_ picture hanging up in the office." "You should steal that for me, it's a badge of honor." "Get a lot of those, do you?")

"I met your friend Noah," he tells Ronan while he's waiting for the lift to raise up the Civic he's working on.

"You didn't run into each other in a juice bar, did you?" Ronan asks. "Because I have standards. You can do yoga or drink kale, not both."

"I don't drink kale," Adam says. "Noah accidentally booked an appointment at the spa."

"That dipshit," Ronan says, his voice warm and impossibly fond. A wave of inexplicable and unacceptable jealousy hits Adam. But then Ronan frowns. "Did you give him a massage?"

Adam hasn't done a ton of dating since he started at the spa, but he's had the _I don't like that you touch naked people for a living_ argument before. Eight weeks in, he was starting to think this wasn't going to be an issue with Ronan. Maybe it makes a difference when the person in question is neither a stranger nor decades outside Adam's dating pool.

"No," he says, striving not to sound defensive. He doesn't need to defend himself. "We played cards."

Ronan breaks into a smile, and then a laugh. "Fuck, that's even better. He snuck up on my boyfriend to play cards with him. I'm going to give him so much shit for that."

Adam grins, too, as the worry slides off him. "I don't think you get to shit-talk people when you went to boarding school."

Ronan turns intense again, like there had never been a reprieve. "How much did he tell you?"

"How much of what?" Adam asks, mystified.

"About my family."

"What, that you don't get along with your brother?"

"He told you that?"

"No," Adam says, slowly, trying not to let confusion bait him. "I figured that one out from my own lived experience, _Declan_," but Ronan doesn't flip him off or gag performatively at the name. "The only thing Noah told me was that you dropped out of boarding school, which is the opposite of a surprise."

Ronan still doesn't say anything, doesn't stop frowning. Adam is running up hard again a boundary: either the tension needs to break, or Adam will.

He changes the subject.

"You should have told me Noah was so lousy at cards, I would have been ready to clean him out."

"He doesn't have a poker face worth shit," says Ronan, whose own face gives away too much. Adam carefully ignores all of his tells and takes the words at their meaning. Ronan doesn't want to deal with whatever mess of emotions is eating at him, and Adam, cowardly, doesn't want to either.

-

Friday night they're lying in bed. Adam _likes_ Friday nights. They're the one night a week he can sleep over at Ronan's place, because he opens the garage on Saturday mornings and Ronan's apartment is closer than his.

So he's relaxed and happy and totally unprepared for Ronan to say, "fuck it, I screwed up."

Adam goes tense in his arms. Braces himself to hear -- something terrible, something earth-shattering. Ronan broke a law, or got in another fight, or cheated on him.

Okay, even his paranoia can't make him buy that Ronan would cheat on him, but it has to be _something_ horrible.

Or maybe not. "I should have just told you about my whole fucking deal after you met Noah."

Is that what he's upset about? Has he been upset about that for the last three days, while Adam hadn't noticed? What was there to be upset about?

_My deal_ \-- Adam knows pieces of it. He knows what Declan said about his brother being the kind of person who gets into trouble. He knows what Noah said about Ronan running away. He knows what Ronan told him about acting out.

He knows enough to know why Ronan's never told him.

He rolls from his side onto his back, twists around until he can see Ronan's face, even though it means Ronan's hold on him loosens, like he's letting Adam slip away.

"You don't have to tell me anything that hurts," he says.

"I do, though," Ronan argues. "I _have_ to."

Adam nods, very slightly. As close as they are, it still feels huge. "Okay."

"My father was murdered," Ronan says, and adds, "when I was fifteen," as though that would be anyone's first question after hearing something like that.

Adam wasn't expecting _murder_. Adam wasn't expecting anything in particular. He hadn't let himself wonder, because _what's wrong with Ronan_ wasn't a question he could think about. It was bad enough that it popped into his head one day, even though he'd banished it a second later.

"I was home from school on a break, and I went out one morning and he was -- "

Ronan's gone for so long that Adam starts to worry. He reaches out and lays one hand on the side of Ronan's face just to do _something_.

Ronan blinks, eyes coming back into focus at the ceiling overhead. He draws his fingers lightly over the back of Adam's hand. "I got really fucked in the head after that." He doesn't seem to notice there's a gap in the story. Adam doesn't point it out. "But nobody cared I was fucked up. Nobody did anything. I was falling apart and everyone just wanted me to do _geometry_. So I kept getting more and more fucked up and everyone just cared less and less, because who cares what happens to some fucked up kid?

"So it freaked me out that Noah might have told you about -- I don't know, shit, the time I stole a car -- and you'd see me like that. Like I was worthless. But if I'm better than that now, it doesn't matter. And if I'm not better than that, you should probably know."

Adam takes a moment before he responds. Long enough to find the part that's broken, the part that hurts. The part that needs attention.

"Do you think that's how you are?"

Ronan thinks about it before he answers. Adam waits. Ronan rushes heedlessly into fights, into relationships, into advanced poses that he is in no way ready for. The full force of his attention turned to linger on one thing is captivating and terrifying. Adam doesn't know if he could survive it.

"No," Ronan says eventually. "I don't know what I am, but I don't think I'm that anymore."

Adam breathes out. He didn't need to hear that, exactly, but he needed to hear that Ronan could say it.

He's morbidly curious about the stolen car, about the pattern of behavior that was apparently one part of, but asking would be like asking about the murder weapon; poking at the painful, unimportant parts for his own amusement.

That leaves him to either poke at the painful parts that _are_ important, or else just let this go. Neither feels like a good course of action.

"You were really close with your dad, weren't you?"

Ronan says "yeah," and his voice is small. _I'm sorry_ would only sound trite. Adam leans forward and kisses Ronan's chest, over his heart. "I wanted to grow up to be just like him. I don't think I can now. It feels too far away, like I lost the _idea_ of dad, too. Declan would probably say that's a good thing," he adds, bitterly.

Adam traces a circle on Ronan's skin, wondering where this falls on the scale. How painful. How important.

"Do I get to ask about you and Declan?" he says finally, putting the decision in Ronan's hands.

"Declan wasn't close with dad," Ronan says bluntly. Adam thinks that that's going to be it, and he thinks yeah, that would do it. "Declan says dad was doing something sketchy with the business. That that's why...maybe he was, I don't know, I don't really..." Ronan's fingers tighten around Adam's arm, almost painful. "A lot of things from that time are just sort of gone, in my head. I think someone might have told me and it didn't get through. But it's not like that makes what happened to him _okay_."

"No, but it's easier to blame someone than to miss them."

Ronan snorts. "If Declan wanted to do things the easy way he shouldn't have spent three years trying to control me like some douchebag Jiminy Cricket."

"I'm surprised he didn't know better." Adam has seen how Ronan digs his heels in if someone so much as tries to make him to change the radio station when he doesn't want to.

"He learned his lesson," Ronan says, a little smug. "Okay, he didn't learn shit, but at least I got to make him miserable. I think -- he had to be punished for not missing dad enough. Or maybe I was trying to make him miss dad, because if dad was still around I wouldn't be such a fucking nightmare. You know?"

Ronan always claims to value honesty, so Adam says "not really."

"Maybe it's a brother thing," Ronan grumbles. "Only child like you can't understand my complicated psychology."

Horror and sickness slam into Adam as he pictures it: another kid in the trailer, and nothing Adam could do to protect him, and maybe he wouldn't even want to. Maybe he'd be glad some of it was falling on someone else, and what kind of person would --

It takes an effort to wrench himself away from that train of thought. He hasn't had a moment like that in a long time. The memories are strong tonight, like they know this is a night for revelations.

And then the horror and sickness hit him again, because _this is the moment he's supposed to say something_.

Ronan opened up enough to share his trauma, and now they're talking about Adam's family. This is the moment.

But -- no. This is Ronan's moment. Adam is supposed to be strong here, for Ronan. It would be selfish to jerk that support out from under him, _you think YOU had it bad_ \--

"Yeah," Adam says, "only child, I wouldn't get it," and he leaves it at that.

It would be easier to believe that this was the noble choice if he didn't feel such powerful, instant relief.

-

Adam can't shake the feeling of imbalance between him and Ronan, and he doesn't like it.

Noah is the easiest cause to name, and to address. Adam has met one of Ronan's friends, and he's spoken to one of his brothers, for whatever that's worth. Ronan has met a bunch of Adam's coworkers, none of whom he socializes with, and one nameless girl that has never spoken a word to either of them. Of course things feel unfair; of course he can't shake the idea that he's holding too much back.

Adam invites Ronan to poker night.

"Better than yoga," is all that Ronan has to say about it.

"I would be embarrassed to take you to yoga anywhere people know me," Adam says. "I don't want Blue to chew me out about your crappy form, you still don't take tadasana seriously."

"It's _standing,_ what is there to be serious about," but Ronan agrees to go to poker night, which is great; now Adam just needs to invent poker night.

"I have played bridge on many occasions," Henry says. "I assume the principles involved are similar."

Adam looks helplessly at Blue.

"I'll teach him," she reassures him.

"Thank you."

"I'm going to wipe the floor with your rich boyfriend," she says. "I should be thanking you."

Henry pipes up, "what if I do not want to learn how to play for the sole purpose of letting everyone beat me at it?"

Blue tells him, "you should learn how to play so that you can go to casinos and pretend you're in a heist movie," and Henry is instantly on board. Blue has a disturbing amount of insight into how his brain works.

Adam hurries the conversation along before Blue can share any of the insight she has about _his_ brain. "Do you mind hosting, Henry? Your place is the biggest."

"Do I _mind_," Henry scoffs.

-

Blue makes an attempt to be normal, as though she hadn't formed an opinion about Ronan the second Adam told her he had a trust fund. "Ronan, it's nice to meet you."

Henry ruins her efforts immediately. "I do not say it is nice yet. I am reserving my judgment on the matter."

"Cool," Ronan says, monotone, "I was worried this was going to be fun."

Adam loudly shuffles a deck of cards.

In the last week Henry has learned enough that he doesn't bid on a trump suit. He still goes bust almost immediately, and when they let him buy back in he goes bust again four hands later. Adam pleads inflation economics to stop him from buying in a third time. Henry appoints himself bartender and brings them an array of bizarre cocktails, some of which they even drink.

No one manages to wipe the floor with Ronan, exactly; while he's not strategic and he doesn't have much of a poker face, he's also unpredictable.

"You went all in on a _pair of threes_?" Adam demands.

"Hey." Ronan snatches halfheartedly at the cards in Adam's hand. "You're not supposed to look at those."

"Why would you go all in? You couldn't have a worse hand if you tried."

"Sure I could. Pair of twos."

But overall the game belongs to Adam and Blue, his card counting and unreadable face against her intuition and the tutelage of three aunts who have, between them, been kicked out of fourteen different casinos. He grins at the first prickle of competition, sees her grin back before she picks up her new hand -- but at some point his grin goes narrow and sharp, his voice terse, his gestures tiny and tightly controlled, while Blue expands to fill too much space, smirking broadly and drawing her words out a little too long in that way that she knows irritates him and sweeping her arm wide to pull the pot in when she wins.

It ends abruptly when Henry collapses across the middle of the table, sending chips and cards flying. "I am," he proclaims, "_so bored_," and Adam realizes with a jolt that he and Blue have taken it too far, like they sometimes do.

They move from the table to Henry's polka dotted couches. Adam can't find the right headspace for conversation, but that's okay. Henry has never met a silence he couldn't fill, and there aren't many of those. Granted, ten minutes of Ronan and Blue arguing about bike lanes is probably _worse_ than silence, but Henry puts a stop to that with the sweeping and baseless proclamation "of course, we can all agree that horse-drawn carriages are the superior mode of transportation" and then launches into a lengthy rant on shrinking bee populations. Ronan is unexpectedly interested in that, because Ronan exists primarily to cause chaos and confusion. Adam can only watch him with a kind of helpless wonder, even when Henry salaciously offers to bring Ronan to his lab and show him his work, because he wouldn't be Henry if he didn't swing at every pitch.

"This is actually going well," he confesses to Blue, when they're alone in the kitchen getting more drinks.

"You don't need to sound so surprised," Blue says. "Were you afraid you'd be embarrassed?"

"Of him or of you two?" Adam answers with a question, just to be a shit.

Blue rolls her eyes and doesn't engage. "Did you think we'd scare him off?"

Adam snorts. "No."

"Did you think he'd be mean to us?"

"Not any more than he is to everyone else."

"Were you worried Henry would hit on him?"

"I'm pretty sure Henry is doing that as we speak."

"So what were you worried about?"

"I don't know," Adam says, and when Blue gestures at him to continue, "I don't know!"

"Maybe next time figure out your worst case scenario _before_ you turn it into a whole thing."

"Sorry I kept you from meeting him," Adam says, "you two are getting along so well, after all." 

"Figure your shit out for _your_ sake, Adam," she says in exasperation. "Okay, and maybe a little bit for my sake. You're not as much fun to be around when you're deliberately making yourself unhappy."

"I don't deliberately make myself unhappy."

"Yeah, I know." Blue squeezes his hand. "Let's go save your boyfriend from my boyfriend."

Adam spends the drive back to his apartment reworking the words _did you have fun_ over and over in his head. He can't find a way of asking that doesn't sound pathetic, like he's demanding that Ronan reassure him. He can't figure out how to be okay with not knowing, though. He wants to be reassured, he just doesn't want Ronan to know that he wants it.

He decides to say something before he deliberately makes himself unhappy.

"I had a good time."

"Yeah," Ronan says. It doesn't make Adam feel any better. There's an odd hesitancy in Ronan's voice that he doesn't like.

"If you didn't," he starts. The words _that's fine_ die on his lips. "I'd want to know, I guess."

"I did, I just -- " Ronan lifts a hand off the steering wheel to scrub at his face. "I think your friend was hitting on me."

The emotion he feels is so unexpected that it takes Adam several attempt to recognize it as _mirth_. "Gee, you think?"

"You noticed?"

"Lynch, your ancestors a thousand years ago noticed that their descendant was getting hit on in the future," Adam says. "Henry's not exactly _subtle_."

"And you don't _care_?" Ronan asks. "You just sat there and watched someone else make a pass at me?"

"I didn't think it was my place to defend your honor," Adam says. "Now that I know you _want_ me to -- "

"I don't," Ronan snaps in a way that means that he really truly does. "_Sargent_ just sat there and watched her boyfriend make a pass at me?"

"It's an open relationship and Henry's a flirt. He used to hit on me, too. He doesn't mean anything by it."

"You don't think he was really into you?"

Adam shrugs. "Maybe? I didn't want to find out. My life is complicated enough without hooking up with my ex's boyfriend."

It's quiet for so long that Adam would think they've settled this, except it doesn't feel very settled, like Ronan is still upset about shameless flirts or Adam's failure to protect him from shameless flirts.

Or something else entirely.

"You and Sargent dated?"

"Yeah," Adam says, frowning. Ronan looks troubled by that, but not jealous or upset or mad. Mostly it's confusion, which makes, if anything, less sense.

"She's a chick," Ronan points out.

"I want to be there the day you call Blue a 'chick' to her face," Adam informs him. "You know I'm bi, right?"

"I can barely tell when someone's interested in guys at all, no, I don't know how to magically tell bi and gay apart."

"You knew I was interested in you."

Ronan rolls his eyes. "You dragged me to yoga and groped me, it wasn't a fucking mystery."

"I did _not_," Adam says. "I was extremely careful not to grope you."

"It was a spiritual groping, yoga is for perverts."

"Yeah, if you don't want Henry to flirt with you anymore, definitely don't tell him that." Adam is starting to regret throwing out those bi-flag earrings Henry gave him last Pride, even though he doesn't have pierced ears, what the hell, Henry, and also no he doesn't regret that at all, except apparently he needed _some_ kind of clearly labeled sign to explain the perfectly obvious. "So this whole time I've been thinking how cool it is that you're not weird that I'm friends with my ex, you just thought -- what, exactly?"

"I thought you were _friends_," Ronan says, exasperated, like he's the one who got ambushed. "Why would I assume you used to date your friends?"

"We moved to Boston together, I know I told you that, we met in high school and we moved here and got a place together." Adam hears his voice going short and forces himself to take a breath. Okay, he can't swear on his life that he used the word _girlfriend_ in that story, but why would he _need_ to. "What kind of friends do that?"

Ronan shrugs. "I always wanted a friend like that."

The argument drains out of Adam. That is what Blue turned out to be to him, after all: not the love of his life, but the kind of friend that people wish they had.

They arrive at Adam's building. Ronan parks the car. 

"Does it bother you that I'm bi?" Adam asks.

"No?" Ronan answers, bewildered, like he's not sure he understood the question.

"Does it bother you that I'm friends with my ex?"

Ronan is quiet before he asks, "do you want her back?"

"No." It's easy to say, after years of being broken up, and more so after an evening of pointed reminders of why they broke up.

"Okay. Then no."

"Did you like them?" He knows it's stupid as soon as he asks. Ronan isn't exactly effusive; he calls his own best friend _dipshit_, what does Adam expect him to say about someone else's friends?

Except he says "yeah," and Adam feels like he could fall over, even when he adds, "they're total losers, but they're your friends, so I was expecting that -- " and Adam kisses him only half to get him to shut up.

-

They're at Adam's place, cleaning up after dinner, Ronan doing dishes while Adam puts leftovers away, when Ronan says "I can't come by the shop tomorrow."

"Okay." It isn't like Adam sees Ronan every shift; that would be an absurd thing to demand from someone, and his supervisors would definitely have something to say about it. There's no cause for disappointment. "Plans?"

"I'm doing a thing."

Adam stares at him over the open fridge door, waiting for a single other detail.

"A bird thing," Ronan adds.

By anyone else's standards that wouldn't count as a clarification, but Adam remembers the story about the baby bird. He can't actually forget any of the times Ronan twisted his heart in dangerous and ill-advised ways, even though there's starting to be a lot of them. "A bird thing that you have to do?"

"Maybe," Ronan says, which means _yes._ "It could still suck."

"It could." Adam comes up behind Ronan and hooks his chin over his shoulder. "Does it involve parrots? Because then it'll definitely suck."

"No, it doesn't involve parrots," Ronan snaps at him, but his fangs are blunt. "There's this charity place. They take care of injured birds and owls and shit."

Adam has to rest his forehead against the back of Ronan's neck and breath in along his skin, because otherwise he'd laugh and ask what the difference is between birds and owls.

"I think I've seen fliers for that around campus," he starts, because that's safer, kinder, at least until he puts it together. "You heard about this at the library," he accuses Ronan gleefully. "You're using community resources to better yourself."

"Shut up. College is stupid and knowledge should be illegal."

"You're volunteering with a non-profit you heard about at a university library," and Adam can't keep the laughter out of his voice.

"Shut _up_, you're a fucking traitor."

"You know, if you're interested, we have a program that teaches people job hunting skills -- " and he darts away faster than Ronan can lunge for him. He's breathless on adrenaline. "Or we could help you find a peer mentor -- "

Ronan catches up to him by the couch. Adam is laughing, smiling against Ronan's mouth. He doesn't try to escape.

There's a fake cough on the other side of the room, a minute, an hour, a day later, and his roommate asks, "uh, are you guys using the tv or is that up for grabs?"

-

The upside of having officially introduced Ronan to Henry and Blue is that he can stop avoiding his regular yoga schedule.

"Aw, I don't get one-on-one coaching anymore?" Ronan pretends to pout.

"Henry would be _happy_ to give you hands-on instruction." In actual fact Henry is diligent about not flirting while he's teaching, but that wouldn't give Ronan an excuse to start back in on his new favorite rant about how _yoga is for perverts_. Adam loves that rant, loves how it makes no difference whatsoever when he points out that Ronan has been willingly doing yoga for three months now and so what does that say about him? Ronan is immune to paradoxes. Adam wants to fill his head with riddles and see what comes out, except that there's so many other things he wants to do more, and they have such limited time.

The downside is that they see a lot more of Adam's friends than Ronan's. The uneasy sense of imbalance is creeping over him again. "Why don't you bring Noah to yoga?" he asks, after the third time he has to refuse an invitation.

Ronan makes a _tcht_ sound, dismissive. "Trying to recruit more people into your cult? Nice try."

"I thought we could do more things. Together," although he's not sure who he's including in _we_.

"As soon as Noah meets Sargent she's going to own him and my life will be ruined."

"Okay. Never mind." It's fine. Adam can't even tell what he was thinking. Was he honestly hoping to endure _more_ introductions? Just because the last round hadn't been a disaster didn't mean there wasn't one lurking on the horizon.

He convinces himself of that, and then Ronan shows up at the library one day with Noah in tow.

"This is going to be a challenge," Noah says in a low, serious voice, like a Civil War soldier who lied about his age to enlist and has just now realized what war really is. "But I'm ready to be tested."

"Are you...taking a class?" Adam asks.

Noah blinks, looking confused, which is hardly fair. "No, I did my time."

Adam resists the urge to look over at Ronan. He doesn't want to have to rely on his boyfriend to translate. "So what test are you taking?"

"_This_," Noah says, low and ominous and not enlightening.

"I bet him he couldn't go twenty minutes without getting in trouble," Ronan explains.

"I have volume control issues when I get excited."

"Well, it's not finals," Adam tells him, "you probably won't get yelled at if you break someone's concentration."

"I'm not afraid of getting yelled at. I'm afraid of getting _shushed_."

"The librarian at our school was a mean motherfucker," Ronan says. Noah shudders like he's trying to shake off a bad memory.

"We don't really shush people here." Adam had been counting on this making sense at some point, but so far, no dice. "I mostly just glare if someone's too loud."

Ronan looks offended. "What kind of sexy librarian are you?"

"A normal, non-sexual one?" Adam answers. "Do you think shushing is sexy?"

"I was willing to find out."

"Huh," Noah says, as something occurs to him. "You traded in drag racers for librarians. You got _old_, Lynch."

"It's called maturity, dipshit, look it up."

Adam shakes his head and goes to help a lost-looking undergrad.

The girl shows up later. She stares coldly at Noah, like she wants it to be clear that she has not sanctioned this addition to her library, and then she marches up to Ronan.

"Sup, brat."

She tugs on his arm.

"What?" Ronan demands, and when she points at the desk, "no way, get yourself up."

She tugs on his arm again.

"God, you're lazy," but he's already picking her up, which does funny, inconvenient things to Adam's heart. He locks his eyes on the computer screen in front of him before he can processes any of his emotions. "You don't deserve the Gallic War."

"You gave Caesar to a preschooler?" Noah asks. Ronan looks betrayed. The girl makes an ugly demonic face at Noah, tongue sticking out and eyelids pulled down. "Oh, now I get it."

It's a busy shift at the library. Adam worries in a background sort of way about his supervisor coming by and chasing off the now-_three_ people hanging out at the student help desk who don't need help and aren't students. When that doesn't happen immediately, Adam lets himself be glad there's three of them. He doesn't have much time to entertain Ronan today. That had always been the arrangement, that his work had to come first; it was Ronan's choice to settle for scraps of Adam's attention.

But it eases something inside of him to look over and see Ronan and Noah and the girl all close together, Noah making origami flowers out of college ruled notebook paper, Ronan making something that Adam can't identify except to say that it is not a flower.

"You're cheating," Ronan is saying when he drifts close enough to hear.

"How does someone cheat at origami?" Noah asks.

"I did everything you told me to and it turned out ugly, therefore, you're cheating."

The girl laughs.

"You know what I like about you, Lynch?" Adam says. "It's how you really consider all possible explanations before coming to a conclusion."

Ronan waves the misshapen paper monstrosity at him. "Like you could do any better."

"I wouldn't try."

"Origami is art," Noah muses. "And art is self-expression. This is what the flower of Ronan's soul looks like."

The girl laughs again. It doesn't quite cover up Adam's unconvincing cough.

Ronan scowls, first at her and then at Adam. "You're a bad influence."

"Probably," Adam concedes. He darts in to kiss Ronan's shoulder, which is more daring than he would normally be at work, with an audience. But -- his heart hasn't really _stopped_ doing funny, inconvenient things today. Maybe a small gesture can relieve some of the pressure.

It doesn't.

There's another rush on the help desk, and when Adam has worked his way through it, the girl is standing on top of the desk next to him.

"Need a new book?"

She shakes her head and points at his wrist. He holds it up so that she can see his watch, but she only looks from it up to him, exasperated.

"Do you know how to read a clock?"

She collapses down to a seat, sighing dramatically.

"Let me show you." He waits for her to push herself back up, even if her face makes it very clear she's only humoring him. "The little hand tells you what hour it is, and the longer hand tells you the minutes. So it's 2:30."

She frowns at the clock, interrogating it and clearly not buying its story. She taps insistently at the watch face, near the six.

"You have to times the number by five when you're figuring out the minutes. Because there's sixty minutes in an hour and only twelve numbers."

The look on her face asks Adam who he thinks he's fooling. He gets distracted trying to figure out if she's old enough to know multiplication.

"You know how you tell time?" Ronan asks from further down the desk. "You find a digital clock."

"It's a useful skill to have," Adam says.

"Ugh, you're one of those people that thinks kids should learn cursive and math, aren't you."

"Yes," Adam says slowly, "I do think that children should learn _math_, is that up for debate?"

"They have calculators."

Noah takes off after a while, plans with his parents. Adam takes his break break and Ronan comes with him, makes fun of the ultimate frisbee game out on the quad. The girl is still there when Adam goes back on shift. This is longer than he's used to seeing her at the library, but she's absorbed back into her reading now that the sideshow is over, and it isn't like she would answer a question if he asked her one.

The worry that Adam can usually tamp down is forcing its way through. It doesn't get better when she finally shuts her book and leaves, when there's nothing he can do about it.

Ronan must pick up on his mood, because when they leave the library he asks, "everything okay?"

Adam shoves his fists deep into the pockets of his jacket. "Do you ever think it's odd that a little girl spends so much time alone in a college library?"

"Nah," Ronan says. "I used to do shit like that all the time."

"You used to hang out in college libraries."

"No, but I'd go off by myself. Explore. Hang out."

"You went off on your own when you were this short." Adam gestures. It's the best he can do. He doesn't know how old she is.

"I was never that short."

"I'm serious, Lynch. I've never seen her with a parent. With anyone."

"So? She's independent, good for her."

There's a dull heat creeping over him, anger gripping him tighter the longer he isn't being heard. "Why is _this_ where she _chooses_ to be?"

"Christ, Parrish, it's not like you work at a strip club," Ronan snaps. "She ditches her family to read textbooks about ancient Rome, what's going to happen to her?"

"I'm not worried about what's _going_ to happen to her." He does look, carefully, every time he sees her, but he never sees any bruises, even in spots like the back of the neck that are easy to forget about. He'd like to believe that means she's fine, but -- there's so many ways to cause harm.

"So just because she's a weirdo there's got to be something wrong with her," and now Ronan is getting angry, too.

Adam breaths in, holds it, and lets it out in a controlled exhale. "Forget it."

"No. What the hell is your problem right now?"

"What's the point of answering when you're not going to listen to me?"

"I am listening and you're not making any fucking sense. What the hell are we fighting about?"

"Nothing," Adam says. "Look, I gotta go home." Ronan reels back. He knows Adam's schedule backwards and forwards; he knows there's no reason that Adam has to leave now, except that he can't be here anymore. "I'll see you later," and he leaves before Ronan can respond. 

-

Adam ought to be happy to have a shift at the spa that morning, the one place that he knows Ronan can't show up, except he wouldn't put it past Ronan to risk it anyway. He wonders if he's hoping for that to happen. His stomach is tied in knots. No matter what Ronan does now, he's going to be disappointed.

This whole situation is his own fault. That makes it hurts more. That means he's the one who has to make it stop hurting.

He makes it until his afternoon shift at the library before he gives in. He hasn't done this enough times to have a plan for it. So few people know. Blue had been there. He doesn't really remember how he told Henry, because it involved a case of wine and a lot of crying on Henry's part.

The only principle he has to go off of is that he wants this over as soon as possible.

He picks up his phone and texts Ronan:

_There's something I need to tell you and it's hard to say, so I'm just going to say it_  
_I was physically and verbally abused by my father for most of my childhood_  
_So I have some weird hangups_  
_Sometimes I don't react to things the right way_  
_And I'm not good at trusting people or situations_  
_I know that none of this makes me an easy person to be with_

Ronan doesn't respond for twenty-eight minutes. When he does, it's not to send Adam a text. It's to show up at the library with an armful of crap.

Adam eyes him coldly, lets his gaze linger on the crap before rising up to Ronan's face.

"You panicked."

"No," Ronan says stubbornly. Apparently it isn't a lie if Ronan is pretending hard enough that it's true.

It turns out Adam doesn't want him here, after all. This was hard enough when it was words on a screen; it's worse when Ronan is in front of him, alive and adoring and bleeding emotion out of that very shitty poker face.

Adam can't do this.

He grabs a cart of returns and wheels it off into the stacks. Maybe it will be better if he can move, if he isn't looking at Ronan, if they aren't on display in the middle of the library like some theater major's half-assed attempt at performance art.

"So you genuinely thought it was a good idea to show up at a library with a six-pack, flowers, and a teddy bear," Adam says icily.

"Yes."

Adam riffles through the cart until he finds a book that belongs in this section. He's not doing this right. There's a system for the returns and he's screwing it up.

Ronan follows him down the aisle, too close.

"You can't do this," Adam tells him.

"I can't do something nice when you're having a bad day?"

"No."

"You would do something nice for me if I was having a bad day."

"No," Adam says, "I wouldn't."

"You're such a fucking liar." A nearby student looks at them, scandalized behind her hipster glasses; they're still the drama department's shittiest new project. Ronan snaps at her, "you're in college, you've fucking heard worse."

That is the exact moment that Adam's supervisor walks by.

"Can I help you?" she asks Ronan pointedly. Her eyes linger on the beer.

"He was just leaving," Adam says, before Ronan can try to answer that.

Ronan stares at him: _you're really throwing me out_.

Adam places another book on the shelf. He doesn't let his eyes turn away until he knows that Ronan is gone.

-

"I'm outside your apartment," Ronan says, when Adam picks up the phone. When Adam doesn't respond, he adds "can I come up?"

"You can't stay long," Adam tells him.

"I know. It's Thursday."

That easy regard for Adam's boundaries suddenly makes him furious. "I don't need you to take care of me," he snaps.

There's silence on the line before Ronan says, "but I need it, though."

Adam angles the phone so it won't pick up his sigh. "The door's open. My roommate's playing video games in his boxers."

"Cool, today wasn't enough of a boner killer already."

In no time at all Ronan is standing in the door to his bedroom.

"No presents this time?"

If Ronan feels attacked by the way Adam asked, he shrugs it off. "I gave them all to a homeless chick. She thought I was crazy, but I thought she was crazy too, so fair's fair."

Adam waits for whatever Ronan came here to say, holds himself still and careful on the other side of the room.

He's a lot better at waiting than Ronan.

"Can I touch you?"

"_Don't_ \-- " Adam has to stop and exhale, get rid of some of the violence in that tone. "I don't want you to _ask_ me."

"Apparently I'm supposed to ask before I bring you flowers, how the hell do I know what to do?"

"You're supposed to not treat me like a victim." Dammit, Ronan's restless energy is getting to him. He has to cross his arms, hands gripping his elbows, to stop from doing something more pathetic. "This is new to you but it's not new to me. I want you to treat me the same way you always have."

"I thought I fucked up," Ronan says. "I thought you told me because I was supposed to do something."

"You're _fine_," although Adam can hardly blame Ronan for not believing him, when he says it like that, painfully short. "If you do something wrong I'll tell you."

"Like giving you flowers."

Adam shuts his eyes. They're not past that yet? "I promise the next time you give me flowers, I'll be swept off my feet."

Later, when an enormous vase of roses will arrive for him at the club, when it will go through the mail room and the front desk and the spa receptionist before it gets to him, when something like half a dozen of his coworkers will read the card _you have to be swept off your feet, you promised_ \-- later, he will get mad, and then he will laugh, because there's nothing else to do.

For now, though, it's just him and Ronan, who looks, fuck, hurt and confused and sad down to his bones, more than he can hide, and Adam can't stand it anymore. He kisses Ronan to get rid of that look, or at least hide from it, and then he can't stop. He kisses Ronan over and over like that can fix the jagged aching part inside of him, and it can't, but it helps.

Ronan places a hand on his side and one on his back, low. There's no pressure there, only contact.

"I told you because I thought you should know." He rests his head on Ronan's shoulder, still avoiding eye contact. "I hate that this is part of me. I hate telling people. I hate that someone could think that this _is_ me, that this explains everything. It doesn't. But -- it's part of it."

Ronan runs his hand in a small circle on Adam's back, over and over; Adam hates it, and then he lets out the breath that he's holding and admits that it feels wonderful.

"I want to know all of you," Ronan says. "I'm sorry I fucked it up with this part."

"You're not who I want an apology from."

"I'll say it anyway. Even though apologies suck ass."

Adam laughs like he's choking on it.

"What, like you _like_ apologizing," Ronan says. "You're worse at it than I am."

Adam turns his face in toward Ronan.

"No one's ever bought me a teddy bear before. Thanks."

Adam is close enough to feel Ronan's chest move as he inhales sharply. The hand on his back pulls him in closer, but all Ronan says, striving to sound unaffected, is "see, that wasn't an apology, you _suck_ at apologies."

Adam shakes his head and puts his hands on Ronan's back, so when he steps away Ronan will know to follow him.

It's still hard to look at Ronan, or hard to be seen. Adam stays close to him, which makes it trickier than it ought to be just to lie down, but they get there in the end, stretched out on top of the covers alongside each other. Adam presses an ear to Ronan's chest, where somewhere his heart is beating, unheard. Ronan runs his fingers through Adam's hair. His nails are too short to scratch in a really satisfying way; Adam doesn't care at all.

"You'd tell me if there was something I could do," Ronan murmurs. "Right?"

"Look, it isn't -- " Adam struggles with it. "You're trying to put a band-aid on a scar. It's over, and you can't change it."

"But observing something changes it, it's like Heisenberg or whoever said."

"That's not the Heisenberg Principle."

"I said _or whoever_," Ronan defends. "I'm a high school dropout, what do you want from me," and Adam has a sunburst thought that _I can't possibly be dating this person, this person can't possibly exist_.

"I don't want things to change," he says softly.

"What if they got better?"

Adam doesn't respond. The only answer that would feel honest is _they don't_, but he knows they do. Things are better now than when he was a kid, in pain and alone and the loneliness was almost worse than the pain. They're better than when he was a teenager, working so hard he felt like he was going to just stop existing, afraid in quiet moments if that was the whole point. They're better, even, than when he'd been with Blue, making each other miserable by the end, confused how they could be in love and miserable at the same time.

They lie like that, quiet, until Adam's phone rings an alarm, telling him it's time to go to sleep.

Ronan says, "it's Thursday."

"I know."

Ronan kisses him one more time, short and light, and when he stands up he pulls at the jagged place inside of Adam and tears it open a little more.

"I'll see you at the garage tomorrow," but there's an unspoken question at the end of it, _right?_

"Yeah," Adam says. "Yeah. Goodnight."

Ronan leaves. Adam sits with his head resting on his arms resting on his knees, and he doesn't get ready to sleep.

-

"My Monday lecture got cancelled this week," Adam says. "Do you want to do something?"

Things have been -- a little weird, for the last week or two. Adam can't tell if Ronan has been treating him differently, or if he's just scouring every interaction so thoroughly, _looking_ for signs that Ronan has been treating him differently, that he ruins them. Either way it hasn't been comfortable. He's looking forward to half a day of getting to exist with Ronan, without work or yoga or chores around the apartment to distract them, without any easy routines or bad patterns.

So he's more disappointed that he should be when Ronan says, "I'm doing a thing on Monday," at least until Ronan shrugs and rubs self-consciously at the back of his neck. "You could come. If you want."

"Bird thing?" Adam asks. Ronan really only gets tongue-tied like that about volunteering, like he doesn't want to admit he's doing good things, or like he doesn't think he's supposed to.

"And a car thing," Ronan says defensively. "It's a bird-car thing."

"Okay, I'll tag along."

"Yeah?"

"Yeah," Adam says. "I want to know what a _bird-car_ is."

It turns out that a bird-car is a van that Ronan drives out of the city when the bird sanctuary is ready to release rehabilitated birds back into the wild. Adam spends the long drive catching Ronan's eye in the rear view mirror over and over again. The other passengers, a veterinarian and a woman who introduced herself as the sanctuary's volunteer coordinator, tell him endlessly about the _majesty_ of birds and how _rewarding_ it is to work with them and the deep _purpose_ they find connecting with wildlife, and he knows that Ronan can tell that every second of eye contact is code for _I'm sorry, you think that I'M the one in a cult?_

At least that's what he's thinking about until the coordinator says "of course, Ronan has been a godsend, he's wonderful," and then Adam goes wide-eyed and gleeful, _oh really, is that so_, and milks every last compliment out of her, to mock Ronan with later.

Ronan pulls the van onto an access road off the highway, takes them ten feet down and throws the van into park. They're nowhere in particular, just an unremarkable bit of woodland. Adam half-thinks that he stopped the van so he could disprove the claim that he is _a joy to work with_, but then the vet gets out of the car, too, and he realizes that this is the spot they were looking for.

The vet lifts a pet carrier out of the back of the van and peers inside. Adam can't see the bird from where he is; he thinks she's sulking in the back. He would, too, if someone made him ride in a plastic cage.

"This little lady was hit by a car right around here," the coordinator says, like she's noticed Adam eyeing the area.

"You brought her back to the accident site?" He doesn't know if birds have the capacity to remember something like that, but it seems needlessly cruel.

"We knows it's in her territory."

The vet sets the pet carrier down, satisfied with his observation. Ronan puts on a pair of thick leather gloves and opens the door. The falcon peers out at the world, suspicious, and makes no move to leave. Ronan reaches in and pulls his arm back out with her perched on his glove. She snaps at him.

"Hey, knock it off." He strokes the top of her head more gently than Adam would've expected given the thickness of the gloves. For a second he's pissed off on her behalf. She has deadly talons and a sharp beak and she could maim all of them if she wanted to, she doesn't need to be _handled_ with _care_, like she's still damaged.

It's gone the next moment, and he's back to watching his boyfriend be a huge dork about a bird.

"Go find your mate or your favorite tree or whatever, you gotta have something you missed out here," Ronan says. "Go murder a baby rabbit."

The falcon takes off with a suddenness that's alarming, like she'd been waiting for _this_ exact moment. She launches herself at the trees and wings it away, out of sight in a matter of seconds.

They hang around a while longer. It's maybe so they'll be on hand if something goes wrong, except Adam's pretty sure it's _actually_ so the three grown adults he's with can mourn the loss of their murder bird.

They drive back into the city and drop off the veterinarian and Adam's new favorite person back at the sanctuary.

They're walking to the car and Ronan says, "hope that wasn't too boring for you," like he doesn't care if it was, or like he wants to sound like he doesn't care.

"No, I loved it," Adam says, earnestly. "It was _life-changing_."

"Go to hell."

"I learned so much," Adam says. "I had no idea you were a godsend, really," and Ronan shoves him up against the side of the car.

"Christ, I can't take you anywhere," he complains, before he shuts Adam up in the best way possible.

It's a while before they actually get in the car, before Ronan opens the passenger door and pushes Adam into the seat, "ugh, let's get out of here." Adam is grinning the whole time it takes for him to buckle his seat belt, for Ronan to get behind the wheel and start the engine, for them to leave the sanctuary behind. He's in a really good mood, he realizes. More than he'd be just from teasing Ronan or kissing Ronan. 

He turns his head to the driver's side. This isn't his good mood, he thinks, or not only his good mood. There's a light in Ronan's face that he doesn't know he's seen before.

"You liked doing that, huh," he observes.

"I got to drive around and play with a bird, why wouldn't I like it."

"Do you think it matters?"

Ronan's face clouds over as he considers his answer. Adam almost regrets the question. He hates to see that light flicker.

Ronan says, tentative, "it feels like it does."

Adam breathes out. "I'm glad. Because you matter to _me_."

Ronan looks over, suspicious, like he thinks this is more teasing. Adam holds his gaze.

The suspicion morphs into something else and the light comes back to Ronan's face, stronger than before.

-

He doesn't have time to stay at Ronan's place for long, not when he doesn't get there until ten o'clock, but after the day he had he wants to at least _see_ him.

"So rich people suck," Ronan says when Adam has finished complaining about his shift at the spa. "What else is new?"

"You're a rich person," Adam says.

Ronan grins, like he doesn't care that the comment has a bite to it. "Yeah, and I'll suck any time you want," and he's so cheesy Adam can't help but groan, press his face against the back of the couch and relax for a second.

"Seriously." Ronan leans in; his arm is resting along the top of the couch, not close enough to touch but close enough Adam can still feel it in some prickling animal way. He wonders if this is more of Ronan being careful with him. He wonders if he cares. "Something else wrong, or are you just pissy today?"

Adam sighs. He almost got to forget. "My roommate's moving in with his girlfriend at the end of the month."

"Naked video game stoner has a _girlfriend_?" Ronan asks, incredulous.

"I try not to think about it," Adam says. "It's going to suck replacing him."

"You don't even like him, what's the problem?"

"He pays the rent on time and I've never actually caught him selling drugs out of the apartment. That's as high as I raise the bar for roommates."

Ronan is quiet for a long time. Adam gets tired of waiting for his arm to slide down the couch and onto him. He uncurls from his slump and straightens up, out of Ronan's reach.

"Your lease is month to month, right?"

"Yeah."

Ronan turns this over in his head, like he has to make sense out of that answer.

What it adds up to is the words "you should move in with me."

"No," Adam says immediately.

Ronan flinches. That would have been enough to tell Adam he was hurt, even if his voice wasn't dripping with it. "Oh, as long as you've thought it through."

"It's just -- " Adam struggles with how he can explain. They're starting too far apart, if that idea could even occur to Ronan. "It's not a good idea."

"Why not?"

"We've only been together five months."

"And I still only get to spend the night with you once a week."

"Exactly," Adam says. "You think you can go from that to every night without getting tired of me?"

Ronan stares him down, like he's making a point, or like he's doing his own swift recalibration.

"You think that out of all of the ways we could fuck this up, we're going to get _tired_ of each other and _drift apart_."

He doesn't, when Ronan puts it like that, but he also doesn't care for being dismissed so easily. "It's possible."

"No, having a fight is possible. Forgetting how to fucking talk to each other is possible. Me getting tired of you is not _possible_."

"Really," Adam says, "when I'm cranky in the morning, and when I need space all of a sudden for no reason, and when I question every decision you make because I can't accept anything I didn't come up with, you're not going to get _tired_ of me?"

"No," Ronan says bluntly. "I'm not."

Adam forces a long breath in and out, and then another, deeper. Trying to shake Ronan's certainty is like smacking his head on a brick wall; it doesn't make a dent and he just gets weaker the longer he tries.

He strips it as bare as he possibly can. "Living together makes people hate each other. I don't want -- "

He stops. He doesn't even want to say it.

"I won't," Ronan says.

"How do you _know_?" Adam is halfway to pissed off. Ronan doesn't say it like a promise or a wish. He says it like he already knows the future, when there's no way he can.

"I know," Ronan says, like that's all the answer anyone could need. "I want to live with you, even when you're cranky and you second guess me and you yell at me for buying you flowers." Adam glares. Ronan finally closes the space in between them, places his hands around his face and kisses the corner of his mouth. "I want as much of you as I can get."

"I'm not good at sharing myself," Adam says.

"I thought you've been doing okay." Ronan's thumb skips over his skin, rests on the corner of his mouth, where he's just been frowning, where he's just been kissed. "If you don't want to live together -- "

"I do."

Ronan freezes. Like _this_ of all things he can't trust. Adam suddenly, painfully, wants Ronan to believe him with the same graceful ease that he believes himself.

"I do," he says again. "I want to live with you."

"Really?"

Adam nods.

"And -- " Ronan struggles to catch up, still caught off guard. "You're going to do it? You're going to move in?"

He hesitates. This moment needs a _yes_, a clear unambiguous open-armed acceptance to make up for every time along the way that he's fumbled it, but -- "does it have to be _here_?" he asks, nearly begging.

Ronan laughs once and presses his forehead against Adam's. "You don't like my apartment?"

"I want to live somewhere that's been vacuumed this millennium."

Ronan laughs again. It barely makes a sound, but Adam feels it run through him.

"Okay," he says softly. "We can get a new place. Our place."

Adam shuts his eyes and nods, _yes_.

Ronan licks his lips. They're so close together that Adam shivers. "What changed your mind?"

"You kissed me when I glared at you," Adam says, but he means _you didn't let me push you away_ and _I want that to mean something_ and _I want all of this to mean something_.

Ronan tilts his face and kisses Adam. It comes in stages, like he has to appreciate every step fully before he can move on to the next one. First it's just the lightest brush of his lips over Adam's, and then there's a slow growing pressure, before his mouth opens and his tongue slides into Adam's mouth. Their breath mingles together. His hand slides around the back of Adam's head, stroking his hair and holding him in place, and there's a heat in Adam's belly long before he gets there, long before they're really truly kissing, because he knows what this means.

Sometimes when they have sex they go hot and fast because that's how it hits them, _now now now_; sometimes that's all they have time for. But sometimes it's like this, where Ronan is perfectly happy to spend the entire night nosing at Adam's hair and skating his hands up the back of Adam's shirt and kissing the side of his neck. Sometimes it stretches out until it splits Adam down the middle. He loves every second that Ronan spends on this, touching him with no purpose, touching him like that is his purpose, like he wants to get to know every inch of Adam's body, the better to worship it. But every second of this kills him, because he can't wait, because he needs all of Ronan _now_ while he can still get him. Because he can feel himself breaking under the weight of Ronan's care.

Ronan rests one hand on the small of his back, uses the other to stroke the inside of his elbow. His face turns up from Adam's neck to kiss him once, feather light. Adam moans, a soft breathy exhale against Ronan's mouth, and he returns the kiss exactly how he got it, even though he's shaking from how much he wants to grab Ronan and tear into him.

Ronan's hand floats down to his side, pushes up at the hem of his shirt. Adam gasps at how sudden that is, even though he feels like he's been waiting for hours. Ronan pushes the shirt up one more inch, and one more, until Adam tugs at Ronan's shirt. It's the opposite of helpful; they have to untangle from each other so they can pull their own shirts off, and then Ronan is right back in the game, running a line of open-mouthed kisses up and down Adam's collar bone like that's all he's planning on doing, for the moment, for the night, for the rest of their lives.

Adam shivers. This is teetering on the edge of _ticklish_ and _painful,_ until it gives way suddenly and falls somewhere that isn't either. He relaxes against the couch so much that he starts to slide down it.

Ronan guides him down so his back lands flat on the couch cushions. He turns his eyes up toward Adam and makes a sound, _hmm_, wordless when his mouth is full of Adam's skin. He can decipher it anyway -- is he okay with this, is this what he wants. He doesn't know what he wants, _more_ but also _this_. He turns his face up and away, exposing his neck to Ronan. It's all the answer either of them needs.

Ronan bends over him to scrape his teeth lightly over his neck. Adam shivers and tilts his head up more. When he opens his eyes he can just see the coffee table. There's a bottle of lube sitting on it; he dropped by a couple of days ago for a quick hook up on his way from class to the garage, and it hadn't been put away afterward. It's embarrassing that it's still out here. Adam couldn't get away with that at his apartment -- but his apartment and Ronan's are about to be the same thing.

Adam makes a noise, halfway to a whimper. Ronan takes him in for a long moment before following his line of sight.

"Oh, _fuck_, yeah." He reaches for the lube, and Adam's heart is beating faster before he's even picked it up.

Ronan takes his time fingering Adam, moving deep and slow inside him and dropping kisses on his face and his torso and hips and thighs and elbows and _everywhere_. It's maddening. The more places he touches Adam, the more aware Adam is that all he's getting of Ronan is his mouth and his fingers. The rest of him only grazes Adam in passing, Ronan's broad shoulder bumping into his calf when he drops low to kiss the inside of his knee, Ronan's left hand on his ankle before he slides it off the couch to spread his legs wider, the tip of Ronan's cock brushing against his stomach when he straightens up over him to watch his face, and how is _Adam_ the one left moaning by that brief contact.

Adam finally gives in and does what he's aching to do. Sometimes he can be patient, but when Ronan is like this the foreplay lasts forever. And Adam loves that, he does, but right now he's going to climb onto Ronan's lap and slide down onto his cock and ride him, fast and dirty.

Or that's what he thinks. Once he has Ronan inside of him the urgency falls away. He groans and lets Ronan set the pace, slow and thorough. He feels more aware than he ever has been of every inch of Ronan that slides into him. He captures Ronan's mouth with his, holding his body against Ronan's, tying them together in as many ways as he can. And then he pulls away, to look Ronan, to stroke a hand down his chest and find the place where Ronan's cock disappears inside of him. Ronan swears, soft and low, and looks him right in the eyes.

Adam kisses him again, and again, and then -- he can't stop, it's the only thing he wants to focus on, Ronan's breath trickling into his lungs and Ronan's mouth fixed on him, so tight that nothing can separate them. He doesn't even want to ride Ronan anymore, not really, not if it means he can't have this.

It does end, of course. No kiss lasts forever. Adam breathes in so deep he's dizzy with it, so deep he would fall over if his arms weren't linked around Ronan's neck.

Ronan's voice is a wreck when he asks, "do you want to stop?"

Adam shakes his head. He can't put words to what he wants, but _stopping_ is no part of it.

Ronan breathes out with a shudder. "Bedroom?" and Adam nods desperately, _yes_.

Adam hits the bed first, landing on his back and pulling Ronan down after him. "Come on," he says with a sudden heat at the sight of Ronan over him, "come on, come _on_," and he's finally done to Ronan some fraction of what Ronan does to him. Ronan shoves into Adam and fucks him hard, one hand on his shoulder and one on his hip to pin him in place for every powerful thrust. Adam claws at his back and grips with his thighs so he can pull him in _more_.

Ronan lets go of his shoulder, drags a hand down his chest, down his stomach, and Adam is panting by the time he gets to his cock. He runs his thumb over the head and squeezes lightly, starts pumping his fist up and down.

Words break in Adam's throat and fall out of his mouth, nonsense he can't follow. Ronan runs his nails down Adam's thigh, unexpected and sharp, and it's over, it's over; Adam throws his head back, his body arches up under Ronan, and he comes.

Ronan keeps working him until he's finished, and then he pulls out, a sudden harsh move. Adam opens his eyes in time to see Ronan jerking himself off. There's some trick of the light there, a ghost image on double exposed film; Ronan's hand is moving between Adam's legs, and for a moment he would swear he could feel Ronan stroking _his_ cock again. His body wants to answer that touch and it can't. There's nothing left for him to work with, and the frustration tastes as sweet as satisfaction. He groans.

"Shit," Ronan hisses, "shit, _shit_," and his nails dig into Adam's thigh as he comes all over his stomach.

They lie next to each other in bed for a while before Adam can even think about cleaning up. He maybe dozes off for a bit; at some point he opens his eyes and Ronan is nuzzling at the space just behind his ear. Adam turns to kiss him softly, and this time there's nothing being held back by that gentleness. It exists on its own, and he likes it that way, too.

He pulls away, and Ronan is watching him.

"Tissues?"

Ronan grabs the box on his side of the bed and makes a half-hearted effort at wiping Adam clean. Adam figures _good enough_ and wraps an arm around him.

Kissing turns into soft touches turns into easy slow breathing together. Adam feels sleep falling over him, but it eels away at the last second, leaves him too awake. Ronan has rolled over to lie on his stomach, but his eyes are twitching under their lids. He isn't asleep either.

Adam skates his thumb over Ronan's tattoo. It's still a thrill sometimes to get to do that -- he remembers how he hadn't wanted to touch it that first time he saw it, not when it shot a jolt of curiosity and lust clear through him. He'd had to pretend it wasn't there to do his job. But now he gets to touch it whenever, however he wants to.

He props himself up so he can see it better, props himself up more so he can lick the skin on Ronan's back, trace the lines of ink with his tongue. That stops being enough; he straddles Ronan's hips and gets both hands on him. He runs his fingertips idly over the tattoo, traces the shape of it so many times he loses track, and then he rubs at his shoulders.

Ronan shifts a little, and then a second time, bigger. Funny, he's never squirmed under Adam before. "Tickles?"

"Nngh." Ronan makes a dissatisfied noise. "I don't like when you do that."

Adam's hands fall still. "What, give you a massage?"

"Yeah."

In Adam's experience, back rubs are generally considered a plus. He lays his hands flat against Ronan's shoulder blades. "Really?"

Ronan squirms again. "It's like I'm a customer again," he complains. "Like I'm paying you."

_You are paying me_, Adam thinks. That's the way it works: Ronan pays him in company and affection and irritating jokes and an attention to his needs and wants that's so close that it scares him sometimes; and in return Adam pays him in massages and arguments about nothing and nights where he listens to the things Ronan says without words and _trying, trying so fucking hard, I promise I'm trying_.

But Ronan would never accept such a prosaic and transactional definition of a relationship. When Adam tries to translate it into a more romantic language for him, it doesn't sound right. _I like doing things for you_ falls short and gets caught in his throat until he can't say anything.

He leans forward and bites down on Ronan's shoulder as hard as he can.

"Hey!" Ronan's whole body jerks at the betrayal.

"What?" Adam asks. "That wasn't a massage."

"Fucker." Ronan twists between his legs, trying to get a hold on him. Adam's in good shape, but Ronan is the one with the shameful past as a member of his boarding school's wrestling team, thank you _very much_ Noah for letting that detail slip. Ronan is the one who likes playing rough, and if Adam is learning to like it, too, is learning how to laugh and fight back when someone grabs him, he's still at a disadvantage. This is never going to be a real contest between them as long as Ronan is actually trying. He's trying now, not to be hurtful or spiteful but just for the sake of competition. Adam can understand that. Adam is making him work for it, after all.

It's a few minutes of wrestling, strong hands and burning skin and friction, before Ronan has Adam pinned down to the bed, before Adam whispers "shit" in a voice soaked with desperation.

"Shit," Ronan agrees, and jerks his hips forward, rubbing against Adam. Adam grinds back against him, grinds down against the bed. He feels Ronan's breath hot on the back of his neck and tries to turn to kiss him. It's sloppy and awkward and perfect.

"Ronan." Adam can't articulate thoughts more complicated than that, just, "Ronan."

"Oh, fuck." Ronan slows over him but doesn't stop completely. "You want it again?"

Adam makes a sound, fast and helpless.

"Fuck, okay, just -- stay there," and when Ronan comes back from the living room with the lube Adam is half on his side, laughing breathlessly.

"Where did you think I was going to go?"

"Yeah, yeah, get over it." Ronan climbs onto the bed and puts a hand on Adam's shoulder. Adam decides that right this moment he wants to get fucked more than he wants to tease Ronan, so he follows the weight of his hand down onto his stomach without another word. Ronan shoves a pillow at him, which strikes him as funny all over again. He's in serious danger of laughing as he tucks the pillow under him, except then Ronan slides a finger inside of him, slick with lube, and it comes out as a sigh instead.

Ronan preps him, even though he doesn't really need it. It feels good, the easy slide of Ronan's fingers in and out of him, bending at just the right angle to make the muscles twitch along his back, his gut, his legs -- and then Ronan's hands are firm on his ass and the head of his cock is pressing into him. Adam breathes out, one long exhale until he feels empty, until the only thing inside of him is Ronan.

They slow way down again, like this is more of Ronan's endless foreplay. Adam understands how Ronan feels when he stretches a moment out into infinity like that, because Adam feels that way too; he doesn't need anything except exactly what he's getting. He sinks into the bed, blissed out and lazy, and lets Ronan do all the work. From the reverence with which Ronan kisses his neck and traces his fingers and whispers _Adam_ in his ear, he doesn't mind at all.

By the time they get off again, Ronan cursing in a low broken voice and Adam almost caught by surprise, _oh, right, that's what sex does_, they are in desperate need of a shower. Adam drags Ronan into the bathroom with every intention of getting clean, except somehow it turns into jerking Ronan off in the shower and then leaning against the sink while Ronan blows him.

He's on his knees for a long time. Adam burns with lust at the first sight of Ronan's mouth around his cock, but it starts to fade away slowly into contentment. He doesn't mind. He likes this strange quiet happiness in his chest.

"Sorry," he says, and runs a finger down the side of Ronan's face when he lifts his eyes up to meet Adam's. "I don't think it's going to happen."

Ronan pulls his mouth off of Adam and kisses his hip bone. "Want to try somewhere else?"

"No, I'm just tired all of a sudden, I think I want to go to sleep." He's vaguely worried about that -- _I'd rather sleep than have you blow me_ is probably rude -- but he can't work up much anxiety when he's this content. And Ronan doesn't look offended. The expression on his face is -- hard to look at, actually, soft and wondering and amazed.

"Do you want to stay tonight?" he asks, careful, like he's ready for Adam to say no. He could say no, could leave and drive home, even as tired as he is. Except -- what _difference_ would that really make? What difference has it been making all along, it's half an hour missed sleep now or half an hour in the morning, and in between he gets _this_, Ronan looking at him like the next thing Adam says means everything.

"Yeah," he says. "I do."

They go back to the bedroom. Ronan heads straight for bed, drops onto it and then makes a face and wriggles the blanket out from under him and dumps it on the ground, which is the closest thing he has to a laundry hamper. Adam plugs his phone in with Ronan's charger, since he isn't using it and almost certainly doesn't need it.

That's when Adam discovers -- 

"How is it one in the morning," he says, completely blank.

"Time's fake," Ronan says dismissively, burrowing into the pillows.

"I have to be up at six-thirty."

Ronan's eyes snap open. There's real apprehension on his face, like he thinks it's his fault for keeping Adam up. "Fuck."

Ronan has a whole catalog of _fuck_s, one for every occasion. Adam's gotten pretty good at distinguishing between them. This one feels like the start of a conversation.

"Let's just go to sleep," and he hits the lights before Ronan can argue the point. He climbs into bed and curls up around Ronan, tired and buzzing with energy at the same time.

There's silence, Ronan giving him a chance to fall asleep. When Adam is still awake a few minutes later he says "and you thought we were going to get tired of each other."

"If you weren't so adorable I'd throw you out of bed."

"I'm not _adorable_," and when Adam peeks up at him Ronan is scowling in a way that can only be described as adorable.

He lifts his face up to kiss Ronan, who kisses back as soft as possible and then tells him, "go to sleep," and Adam does.

-

Adam stares down at his yoga mat where it's spread out along the grass. No matter how much he tries to be present and mindful, the thought keeps sneaking in that this would be an excellent place to take a nap.

"I don't think I can do this today," he admits. His tolerance for exhaustion is pretty high, and he can get a lot done on very little sleep. The downside is that if he exceeds either of those limits, more activity or less sleep, he has nowhere to go but a breakdown.

"At least you showed up for yourself," Blue says.

He gives into the temptation to lie down. Maybe he can meditate instead. He's never been any good at meditating before, but maybe he'll get lucky.

He doesn't get lucky. He puts his hands over his face.

"It looks as though you had a late night," Henry says suggestively. "A late, interesting night?"

Adam groans. He can't believe he spent three hours having sex with Ronan last night. He drops his arms to his sides and opens his eyes, more than a little worried that he'll fall asleep and screw up his entire day.

It's gotten really quiet. He turns his head over and sees Blue with her eyebrows up to her hairline, and Henry -- Henry looks _obscene_.

Oh, shit, did he say that out loud?

Blue whirls around to face Henry. "Not one word."

"But he broached the subject! Why would he share if he did not want his friends to show a polite interest?"

"Nothing about you is polite right now."

"It was a cry for help," Adam mutters darkly.

"_That_, my good man, is not the kind of thing that one needs to be rescued from."

"Okay, that's enough," Blue says, "go away now," and Henry shrugs cheerfully and strolls off into the park.

"Now that he's gone I can admit that he's right," she tells Adam. "This doesn't really seem like a problem."

Adam chews on his lip. "Ronan asked me to move in with him."

"As would I if I had a partner who went three hours!" Henry calls from where he is, apparently, hiding behind a tree.

Blue throws a yoga block in his direction. He ducks back out of sight.

"And you don't want to move in?" Blue asks, as though there had been no interruption.

"I do," Adam says. "I really, really do."

Blue waits with an expression of concentration on her face, and then she shakes her head. "Okay, I give up, I can't see a problem with this."

_Isn't it too early_ and _living with someone makes you sick of them_ and _I haven't lived with anyone that I was dating since you and look how that turned out_ are all perfectly reasonable arguments.

The thing Adam actually says is "what if I think I want to move in with him and I'm wrong?" He rubs his hand over his mouth, but that doesn't change the fact that he said it. It doesn't make the question go away. "I shouldn't have to ask if I know how I feel. Ronan knows. Ronan is _sure_, why don't I get to be sure?"

"It's not your style to go all in," Blue says. "Whereas your boyfriend bet his shirt on a pair of threes."

"Thanks, I'm a pair of threes, that makes me feel better."

"It's a metaphor, it's not going to fit _perfectly_." Her expression softens. "Were you ever sure about us?"

"I thought I was," Adam says. "And then we broke up."

"It doesn't mean you were wrong."

"That's exactly what it means."

Blue shrugs. "I wouldn't change anything. I don't think you would, either. If that's not sure, what is?"

Adam doesn't have an answer for that, either.

"You're going to be okay, Adam. You're really really good at getting what you need."

"I can't tell if that's a compliment."

"It is mostly." Blue kisses her hand and puts it over Adam's mouth. "That is officially my quota for enabling your doubt spirals."

Adam draws on all of the eloquence available to him and flips her off.

"Seriously, that thing that you're dancing around saying? You're not an impressionable person. If you're thinking it then it's probably real. And I'm not the person who needs to hear it."

"I am!" Henry yells, from behind a different tree this time, and Blue yells back at him "go _away_ or I'll seduce Gansey without you!"

-

They're heading into finals, which means Adam is doubly busy, managing his own course load and handling the influx of desperate students at the library. The girl spends as much time wandering the stacks as she does reading; as best he can tell, she's spying on undergrads having deadline-induced panic attacks.

It makes him grateful that Ronan drops by fairly often, another pair of eyes when Adam is too busy to pay any attention to the girl. He's grateful that Ronan _does_ pay attention, that Ronan doesn't dismiss him as paranoid or question why he's never done anything if he's so concerned. He's more grateful than he can express, that the day the girl slams her book shut and sits motionless glaring at it for five solid minutes, Ronan gives her space -- gives them both space -- and waits until she's started flipping sulkily through his ornithology tome to say, quiet in Adam's ear, _at least she gets to hang out with us, that's pretty great,_ the kindest words that Adam is capable of hearing.

But it's a day that Ronan is absent, at the very end of finals week, that Adam gets his answers.

Ronan is off on some sketchy plans with Noah that started with the word "kidnapping;" Adam had decided against follow up questions. The girl is reading on top of the help desk since most of the students have cleared out for the semester, depriving her of her anxiety tourism. Adam's only watching her out of the corner of his eye when she jumps down from the desk, so fast she knocks her textbook over. It makes a loud smack when it hits the marble floor and his eyes are drawn reflexively after it. By the time he looks up the girl is already clinging to the hand of a woman with blonde hair a few shades lighter than hers.

The girl tugs the woman forward, visibly straining to pull her along faster. The woman isn't swayed by this at all, walks forward at an easy pace and doesn't let herself be hurried.

"Hi," Adam says, when they reach the desk in front of him. He feels -- stupid, like he can't get any words out. The only thought he can process is that the girl looks perfectly happy to see this woman. "Can I help you?"

"My niece says she has some books on hold here," the woman says.

"Oh," Adam says, scrambling to realize that this is a demand and that he is going to have to produce what is by now a sizable horde of books. "Yeah, let me get them." He squats down and grabs half of them, deposits them on top of the desk and goes back for the rest.

The woman's nearly invisible eyebrows furrow. Adam has a cold sinking moment before she looks at the girl -- her niece -- and says, "_Dickens_, Opal, really?"

The girl scowls and crosses her arms, even though Adam hasn't seen her touch Great Expectations in months. He gets the sense she isn't defending her taste so much as objecting to someone trying to control it.

"I suppose," her aunt says thoughtfully, "there is worse trouble you get up to while I'm in class."

"She's no trouble," Adam says, and gets thrown off balance when the woman looks at him again. "We like having her here. In the library."

The girl tugs on her aunt's arm. She bends low enough that the girl can whisper something in her ear, and then stands up straight again. "She likes being here, too. That's not something she says very often."

"Oh," Adam says, stupid again. "She's welcome here any time."

The aunt nods and then looks down at her niece and away from him, to his relief. "Do you want to take all of these on vacation? We'll only be gone two weeks."

The girl puts her palms flat on the desk and pushes herself up on tiptoe, high enough she can read all the spines. She digs through them carelessly, sends books sliding along the desk, and pulls out half a dozen, including both of the Roman history texts Ronan had picked out for her. She pulls out The Gallic Wars, too, but puts that back on the desk directly in front of Adam. He smiles at her, or rather, smiles wider at her. He doesn't know when he started smiling.

The girl holds her choices heavily in front of her, and her aunt takes half of them off her hands, leaves her to carry the other half.

"You'll need to tell them," Adam starts, awkward, and now there's two pairs of unnerving eyes on him. "When you check those out, tell them the books need to be returned first. They're on my card right now."

"We'll do that," the woman says, like it's totally reasonable for Adam to have checked out a bunch of books on her niece's behalf. "Thank you."

They start to leave and the girl -- _Opal_ \-- turns back around. She waves with one hand, nearly sending her books tumbling out of her arms, and says in a sing-song voice "bye!"

Adam is grinning so hard it hurts.

-

"That's good," Ronan says, "right?"

"I guess." Over the course of the afternoon relief had given way to sheepishness and a kind of self-centered gloom. "I mean, yes, it's great. She looked -- really happy, that's definitely good. I didn't need to worry about her at all."

"Of course you did, that's what you do."

Adam tries to blot out any embarrassment or disappointment before they can give themselves away.

Judging by the way Ronan catches his hand and pulls it up to kiss the inside of his wrist, he was not successful.

"I don't like being the guy who worries," Adam says.

"You're not."

"I _am_. That's what I do, so that's who I am."

"So? You do eight million other things, too. Why are you the guy who worries instead of the guy who aces finals or the guy who sucks my dick?"

Adam rolls his eyes. He refuses to respond to that question, at least out loud, at least now.

"Hey," he says instead, drawing the conversation back to his laptop. "Look at this one."

Ronan scans the apartment listing for nearly twenty seconds, which is longer than he's given most of them. "It doesn't have en suite laundry," he says and leans back into the couch.

"When was the last time you even _did_ laundry?" Adam demands. Ronan's unexpectedly high standards for apartments had been funny, _at first_.

"Maybe I would do my laundry more if it wasn't down four flights of stairs."

Adam looks wistfully back at the screen, at the apartment that was both in his price range and convenient to two out of three of his jobs, and closes the tab to look at the next hit. At this rate his last month in his old place is going to expire before they find a new place, and he does _not_ want to have to haul all his things to a new building _twice_.

He manages to scrape together a handful of apartments that Ronan will deign to view in person, which felt like more of an accomplishment before Ronan started pulling this shit in person, too.

"It doesn't have enough counter space."

"Are you finally succumbing to your one-percenter heritage?" Adam asks. "You've used up all the rebellion you had and now you're going to become the yuppie you were born to be?"

Ronan pulls back from Adam, offended, and then bends in half to rip open a hole in his jeans, barehanded. He straightens back up and waves a hand over his knee, _would a yuppie do that?_ Adam can see the scabs from last week when Ronan thought he could slide down the railing on the stairs in the university parking lot.

"Then explain to me your sudden need to live in a palace," Adam says, undeterred. "Why can't we just settle on one of these apartments, they're all fine. It's not like your apartment has _bountiful counter space_."

"Yeah, but that's my place," Ronan says. "This is going to be our place, I'm not going to _settle_ when it's our place."

Adam leans back, re-centering himself.

"Okay," he says eventually. "It's sweet that you want me to have nice things. I appreciate that. But I do not give a shit about counter space. What I would really appreciate is signing a lease before the end of the month."

But Ronan isn't swayed, either. "If you can honestly tell me you _like_ this place, fine, I'll sign a lease right now."

Adam resists answering, but Ronan is standing there, irresistible in his butchered jeans and belligerent affection, so he sighs and shakes his head.

"Then let's get out of here and check out the next one."

The next one is -- cute, actually. It's set back from the road by an overgrown courtyard, like it has aspirations of becoming a lost fairy tale castle. The unit the landlord shows them has plenty of counter space, by Adam's estimation; Ronan shrugs like he wants to complain but can't. There's no en suite laundry, but it's just down the hall from the laundry room, a semi-basement unit with enough light from the high-set windows to keep it from being dreary. Ronan even goes "huh" in approval when he sees the little reading nook with the bench seat carved into the wall, because he's a dork like that.

The landlord steps out of the room to take a call. Ronan asks, "what do you think?" and Adam knows, all at once, like doing something for the hundredth time and it finally makes sense.

"I have to tell you something."

He doesn't actually know how he's going to say it yet. He's expecting Ronan to make some smartass comment before he can continue. He's counting on it, really, because it's the easiest thing in the world to respond to Ronan.

But Ronan doesn't say anything. He's gone weirdly closed off in the last ten seconds, watching Adam without any of the eye rolling he'd expect a vague but urgent declaration like that to elicit. Adam is too full with it to imagine not saying it now. It'll be harder to do without Ronan's help but -- that's okay. He can do this.

"You don't have to say anything," Adam goes on. "If you don't want to say anything, I understand. I guess maybe this is coming out of nowhere. But I have to say this before we go any farther. I can't imagine moving in with you if -- if you don't know that I'm in love with you."

Ronan is a lot slower to respond than Adam expected. He's kind of insulted.

"Oh, you fucking asshole," Ronan says, "I thought you were breaking up with me."

"_What_ \-- " but Adam doesn't get to ask what Ronan is talking about, because Ronan frames Adam's face with his hands and pulls him close. Adam can feel little tremors running under his skin.

"Ronan -- "

Ronan twitches, and then drops, fast, to his knees. Adam has a panicked thought that Ronan is going to try to blow him while the landlord is _right outside the door_, but Ronan just presses his face against Adam's stomach, hands gripping the back of his legs.

Adam doesn't understand this gesture, if Ronan is demanding something from him or offering something to him. He _feels_ it, though, on some level that doesn't need words. He rests a hand on Ronan's head, and Ronan turns his face in toward Adam's stomach.

"You thought I wouldn't _say anything_." His voice is muffled. "Like this isn't a huge fucking deal, I'm going to tell you I love you all the time, I'm never going to shut up about it -- "

"You don't have to."

"No, I really do."

Everything Ronan does affects Adam so deeply; he doesn't know how to have that kind of impact -- or maybe he does.

Adam gets down on his knees, on Ronan's level, and carefully rests his hands on his lower back.

Ronan exhales shakily, but his body against Adam's is solid and strong.

Adam shuts his eyes and does not move until the very confused landlord returns.

-

"This is a lot of work," Adam complains. "Why are we doing this? You don't even want our friends to meet each other."

"We can't _not_ have a housewarming party," Ronan says with derision, as though this is obvious.

"If it's a question of etiquette, I'll defer to your good breeding," Adam says, and catches the tea towel that Ronan throws at his face. The existence of the tea towel does absolutely nothing to contradict the idea that Ronan is succumbing to his rich-guy roots, but Adam saves that observation to bug him with later. They've got about half an hour before people arrive and more than a half hour's worth of unpacking to do.

"Fuck, are we done yet?" Ronan stomps on an empty box and crushes it, so there's one less box for Adam to save to use again later. He doesn't feel as bad about that as he should.

"There's still...more boxes than I want to count."

"Let's just shove them in the bathroom and shut the door," Ronan says.

"What happens when people need to use the bathroom?"

"What kind of degenerate uses another man's bathroom?"

Adam kisses him, fast. He means to get right back to work, except somehow it's a minute later and his hands are hard on Ronan's back and Ronan's nose is digging into his neck.

"Hey," Adam says, mock serious. "I have to tell you something."

"Screw you," but Ronan doesn't sound mad. His voice is warm on Adam's skin.

Adam blows into his ear. "I can't believe you thought I was breaking up with you."

"You said we had to talk. That literally means 'I'm breaking up with you.'"

"That isn't what any of those words mean."

Ronan pulls away, but Adam doesn't let him go. He leans back into Adam with a sigh that is very fake and settles his arms around Adam's waist. "What about the boxes?"

"Let's just shove them in the bedroom and shut the door."

They shove the rest of the boxes into the bedroom and shut the door.

It's a nice party. Adam doesn't have much experience with entertaining, but this isn't anything elaborate. He invited a couple of his coworkers, a couple people from study groups, the ones that make life easier instead of harder and aren't impossible to talk to. They all looked a little surprised at being asked, but they showed up, and as far as Adam can tell they're having a good time.

Both of Ronan's brothers show up, which feels like a fraternal conspiracy, although Matthew isn't going to do much good as a buffer since he's been dragged away to talk to a woman from the spa, leaving Declan alone with -- oh God, is that Henry? Adam hurries over and gently steers Henry back to Blue before he has to witness Henry hitting on his boyfriend's brother that he once accidentally asked out. That's one more step of _merging our lives together_ than he's willing to take today.

Blue's in a circle of people that includes one of Ronan's bird buddies, who is showing off pictures on his phone of the sanctuary's new barn owl ("a beauty," per his description; "a pissy little creep," if you ask Ronan, although he says that like it's the same thing).

Blue has a weird look on her face, and when Adam leaves the group she peels away with him.

"Everything okay?" he asks.

"Your boyfriend volunteers with a bird sanctuary," she informs him.

"I'm aware."

She makes that face again. "I have to approve of him, don't I?"

"Yup."

"Oh, no." She comes to a brief halt. "Do I have to _like_ him? I don't know how to do that. This has never happened before."

"You've never liked anyone I dated?" he asks, a bit offended, although he hadn't, in the end, liked any of them that much either.

"You have dated some _real winners_, Adam," and Maura Sargent's disapproval comes through her voice so strongly that he experiences a fleeting impulse to stand up straight and pretend to be a virgin.

"Are you including yourself in that?"

Blue sticks her tongue out at him.

Noah's in the kitchen when they get there, pouring some of every liquid on offer into one abomination of a glass. He introduces himself to Blue as "Noah, I'm Adam's roommate-in-law."

Adam blinks at him. "You're my what?"

"Your roommate-in-law. Because Ronan was my roommate and now you're his roommate."

"That's -- not how in-laws work," is the part of that Adam is going to object to, apparently. Noah's answer is to clink his horrifying excuse for a drink against the empty can in Adam's hand in a one-man toast.

Blue grills Noah for dirt on Ronan; it seems she isn't going to give up and like him without a fight. Adam thinks about staying -- he always wants to hear more embarrassing Ronan stories -- but this isn't sporting. Blue is too good at getting things out of people. He can earn his blackmail on his own, thanks.

Ronan is just down the hall when he leaves the kitchen. Adam wants to wrap an arm around him and stand too close, so he does.

"There you are," Ronan grumbles, leaning into him.

"Sorry, it didn't occur to me you needed backup to hang out in a room full of friendly faces." He looks over to the person Ronan was talking to before he interrupted. It's the infamous maybe-straight Gansey, who's here as Blue's date or Henry's date or both, Adam wasn't going to ask them while the man was right in front of him. "I'm glad you could make it," he says, addressing Gansey this time. "It's nice to get to meet you."

"Likewise," Gansey says. "Your place is lovely."

"_Thank_ you," Ronan says.

"You're taking way too much credit," Adam informs him. "All you did was complain about every other apartment we looked at. It's not like you built the place with your bare hands."

"That's basically the same thing."

Adam smirks at him before he shoots another look at Gansey. He's pretty sure they're being one of _those_ couples, but -- fuck it. Besides, Gansey looks more amused than anything.

"Henry said you'd been together about half a year?" he prompts, which might be a conversation starter or might be a very polite way of saying _wow, honeymoon period much?_ Adam can consult Ronan's socialite expertise later. "How did the two of you meet?"

Adam grins outright. Ronan mutters "here we go," which deters him not at all.

"Actually," he says, "that's a funny story..."

**Author's Note:**

> If you like this fic, you can [reblog it on tumblr](https://toast-the-unknowing.tumblr.com/post/187176549535/this-sudden-burst-of-sunlight-and-me-with-my)!


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